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Re: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

  • From: Travis Pugh
  • Date: Tue Apr 03 13:39:54 2001

On Tue, 3 Apr 2001 [email protected] wrote:

> Why are customers spending money on this?  My belief is that they
> want more say in their own fate.  That may express itself as
> a desire for redundancy in the case of catastrophic business failures,
> better ability to express their own routing policies, or a simple
> worry that they won't get the best price if they have only one supplier.
> At the core of this, though, is a desire for more control over something
> that they see as increasingly important to their own fate.
>

Why is pretty simple, in my (admittedly limited) experience with
customers.  Count the single points of failure on the way from a
customer T1 to the ISP POP.  Customer premesis equipment, especially if
the customer doesn't buy something w/dual power supplies, redundant
control processors, etc.  Copper haul within the building.  T1 local loop.
Telco network.  T1 or hubbed-DS3 card in the provider's customer
edge router.  Provider's customer edge router (assuming it doesn't have
fully redundant components.)  Add to that telco techs stealing pairs, and
all the other fun events I'm sure we've all seen, and life at the end of a
single circuit can get pretty sketchy.  Top it off with a MTR well over 4
hours, especially when the blame game starts, and it gets nasty.

Note that many of these problems aren't fixed until you have APS SONET,
assuming someone engineered the protect path diversely.

Now add a business that can't afford downtime, and multihoming becomes
simple.  How many SPs out there are offering customer circuits into
multiple edge boxes for fault tolerance?  Is this adequate, or does the
availability requirement call for multiple POPs?  Is this adequate, or is
it necessary to go for multiple service providers?

I think the first problem is that conventional wisdom tells the customer
that they have to buy a circuit to two different SPs in order to get
real fault tolerance.  I haven't seen a whole lot of aggressive marketing
about pulling two circuits into two edge boxes, using two different pieces
of CPE or one fault-tolerant one.  The industry isn't pushing the idea
that you can have redundant service from a single provider.  (grain of
salt: one of our providers sold us a backup transit DS3 for the cost of
the local loop)

I'm at a multi-POP network in Boston.  We've had great luck selling
customers a Verizon circuit into one of our POPs and a Worldcom circuit
into a different one.  It costs more, but they don't have nearly the
exposure of a single circuit customer.  However, if you're not set up to
do this, the appropriate level of paranoia calls for circuits to two
different providers.  Maybe if SPs really addressed availability
requirements of their customers, it wouldn't be such an issue.

-travis